Director/scripter Guy Ritchie's film was an inferior,
off-the-track remake of Best Director-nominated writer/director
Lina Wertmüller's satirical and thought-provoking Swept
Away... by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August (1974,
It.) as a plain erotic-comedy and sentimental romantic idyll
-- starring his miscast, athleticized, black-bikinied wife Madonna
in a misguided attempt at dramatic acting, as she had already demonstrated
in Shanghai Surprise (1986) with then-husband Sean Penn, Who's
That Girl? (1987), Body of Evidence (1993) and The
Next Best Thing (2000).

The misguided film turned out to be a nice-to-look
at film (with cinematography by Alex Barber), but it showcased bad
jokes, unintentional campiness, a music-video fantasy segment on
the beach (with Madonna in a gown lip-synching to Della Reese singing "Come
On-A My House" with full orchestra backing), an improbable love
relationship, and an inane, inarticulate and diluted script with
an altered contrived ending, based upon the original screenplay.
Ritchie's and Madonna's efforts were a combined financial, commercial,
career, and creative failure.

The film was nominated for seven Razzie Awards, including
Worst Actor (Giannini) and Worst Screenplay (Ritchie), and it won
five: Worst Actress (Madonna, tied with Britney Spears for Crossroads
(2002)), Worst Director, Worst Picture, Worst Remake or Sequel, and
Worst Screen Couple (Madonna and Giannini). It was also nominated
in 2005 as the Worst 'Drama' of the Razzie's 25 years of awards,
and lost to Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 (2000).

The poorly-paced film was about Amber Leighton (Madonna),
the haughty rich-bitch wife (similar to real-life?) of an apathetic
pharmaceutical-company business magnate named Anthony (Bruce Greenwood),
on a chartered yacht between Greece and Italy with handsomely bearded
deck-hand crew member Guiseppe (Adriano Giannini, aptly the son of
Giancarlo Giannini who was in the original Swept Away, in
his first English-language film). Perturbed by the less than luxurious
conditions on-board, Amber overenthusiastically berated and abused
Guiseppe with degrading nicknames such as "Nature Boy," "Guido," and "Pee-pee." The
wives of other privileged passengers included pill-popping boozer
Marina (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and the dumb Debi (Elizabeth Banks).
Due to a faulty dinghy raft during a cave excursion, both Amber and
Guiseppe were 'swept away' to a deserted island with a white sandy
beach, where their power-roles were quickly reversed in life-or-death
survival, and the starving and shrill Amber -- remarkably and unbelievably
-- became submissive to Guiseppe's "master" dominance -
and actually enjoyed being tamed and experiencing unlikely love in
paradise. Later, she was reluctant to return to her wealthy, upper-class
life style.

Disney Pictures' attempted to provide an animated
futuristic version of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic 1883 literary
novel Treasure Island -- also Disney's first all-live action
feature film in 1950 with Bobby Driscoll and Robert Newton. This
expensive film was targeted at family audiences (but would mostly
appeal to tween boys, the reverse of the market targeted with its
earlier effort Lilo & Stitch (2002)). Unfortunately
for Disney, it was a very costly failure, although it was a landmark
film -- it was the first film to debut in both the conventional
and IMAX formats on the same day.

The animated feature ambitiously brought together 3-D
CGI with hand-drawn 2-D animation, and used oil paintings as backdrops
- processes that took scores of animators/artists and four and a
half-years to complete. The dazzling, colorful film was budgeted
at $140 million but earned only about $40 million domestically, pushing
the studio division's operating income down 7 percent. The downturn
would be that there would be further cutbacks among all studios in
hand-drawn animated films. The project had been the focus of in-house
corporate conflicts dating back to 1985 over whether it should be
completed or not.

This impressive and stunning animation, similar in
scope to another failed Disney effort Atlantis: The Lost Empire
(2001), drastically altered the traditional pirate-themed elements
from the original, with added space-wars components, including space
creatures (a malfunctioning talkative robot named B.E.N (voice of
Martin Short), and a shape-shifting character named Morph (voice
of Dane Davis)).

Its coming-of-age story about filial bonding, bravery
and sacrifice, with great affinity to animator Don Bluth's PG-rated Titan
A.E. (2000), told about a troubled, pony-tailed, earring-wearing
teen with an attitude named Jim Hawkins (voice of Joseph Gordon-Levitt
of TV's Third Rock from the Sun) who dreamed about a legendary
planet called "Treasure Planet" where treasure had been
reportedly hidden by dreaded ancient space pirate Captain Nathaniel
Flint. With a 3-D holographic treasure map or star-chart issuing
from a hand-held orb in his possession, and a space vessel hired
by goofy, canine-like family doctor/astrophysicist Doctor Delbert
Doppler (voice of David Hyde Pierce from TV's Frasier), the
two commenced an intergalactic quest-journey. On board the majestic
space galleon RLS Legacy were stern but slinky feline named
Captain Amelia (voice of Emma Thompson), the squinty-eyed, traitorous
and menacing spider-like Scroopf (voice of Michael Wincott), a dangerously
crafy, mutinous but charming cyborg and galley master named John
Silver (voice of Brian Murray) with an ingenious Swiss Army Knife-like
arm. Action sequences included escape from an exploding planet on
a turbo-propelled skateboard.

Hong Kong action film director John Woo's (noted
for Broken Arrow (1996), Face/Off (1997), and the
big-budget Mission: Impossible 2 (2000)) dramatic WWII epic
told about Marines whose duty was to protect Navajo Indian 'codetalkers'
during combat (actually recruited by the US Naval Signal Corps
to use their Native American language for coded transmissions to
confuse Japanese intelligence eavesdroppers). However, the real
truth was that the Marines were instructed to protect not only
the 'code-talker' but the unbreakable 'code' itself - even if it
meant killing the codetalkers if they were to fall into enemy hands.
Of course, the codetalkers were also subjected to racism and bigotry
while serving their country.

The R-rated film starred Nicolas Cage in a central
role as devoted Catholic, Italian-American Sergeant Joe Enders, an
enigmatic, emotionally-traumatized and gung-ho soldier who was assigned
to a combat unit to invade Saipan in June of 1944 -- which would
ultimately become one of the bloodiest and most chaotic battles of
the conflict. This recreated battle sequence was operatically choreographed
and stylistically photographed by Woo (and cinematographer Jeffrey
Kimball) in a prolonged section of the film with loud explosions,
bloody carnage, and frenetic camera movements. Enders' orders were
to guard (or "babysit") one of the "codetalkers"-
a young, cheerfully-smiling father/husband named Private Ben Yahzee
(Adam Beach), while Sgt. Ox Henderson (Christian Slater) was paired
with fellow Navajo Private Charles Whitehorse (Roger Willie). There
were many one-dimensional stereotypical characters in this film,
including obnoxious, prejudiced red-haired redneck Corporal Charles "Chick" Rogers
(Noah Emmerich), and other by-the-book, sketchily-manufactured supporting
cast members.

This was Woo's first English-language film that went
beyond a formulaic action format, but it mostly fell flat with derivative
Hollywoodish war-film cliches and lack of complete character development.
Its violent and spectacular, thrill-to-kill depictions of hand-to-hand
combat and battle carnage (similar in part to the first half-hour
of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998)) were typical Woo
fare (without some of his signature shots), but overwhelmed the film's
other themes and turned off some potential viewing audiences.

The far-fetched film was received only luke-warmly,
in part for its underdeveloped, mediocre and unsubtle script (and
mishandling of the racism and cultural message by scripters John
Rice and Joe Bateer) and lack of emotional intensity and depth regarding
its real themes. All it turned out to be was another big-budget action/war
film with a major white actor and secondary minority characters -
it should have been more centered on the story of the Navajos themselves
rather than on Cage's inner heroic turmoil. Originally, the film
was scheduled for a fall 2001 release, but the 9/11 tragedy postponed
its release until the following year.